Sun Life Financial

This global financial services firm with a data-driven recruitment strategy uses metrics from Indeed to find engaged and high-quality candidates for roles across the organization.

Sun Life Financial is an international financial services firm specializing in life insurance and asset management. Focused on helping customers achieve lifetime financial security, Sun Life provides a range of protection and wealth management products and services in Canada and key markets across the world. In hiring, Sun Life grows a team that not only delivers on the promise of its products and services, but also brings together the unique skills and interests of each employee to help the organization discover new opportunities.

Growing an engaged talent audience

In order to attract the right candidates and improve on recruiting results, Sun Life wanted to connect with its target audience in ways that were measurable. A focus on candidate engagement required building a framework to track key metrics and link them back to strategic goals. “If I want to try new strategies and engage candidates in new ways, I need to support that recommendation with evidence,” explained Ann Barrett, Director of eRecruitment and Social Media Strategy. “The data points, the pieces of analysis, become critical to telling the story, especially after you’ve made a recommendation. Indeed was great fit because we could measure our candidate engagement at every stage.”

“Indeed educated us about how to increase traffic with their pay per click model, and it was clear that it was much more cost effective than other sources,” Ann explained. Over a year-long period of sponsoring jobs on Indeed, Sun Life had a cost per hire under $100. “It was definitely the lowest cost and was our most effective external channel, providing 30% of external hires,” Ann said.

The fact that we were able to hire so many people from Indeed speaks to the quality of the candidates using it.

Measuring success, building credibility

Those results weren’t the only measure of success for Sun Life. In addition to seeing great performance from its Indeed campaign, they wanted to continually improve. “We put the data from Indeed into a metrics framework because we wanted to make more data-driven decisions,” Ann explained. “We wanted to put our money into solutions we knew were paying off. Being able to look at the results and compare against other channels made that possible. As a result we could be confident that investing with Indeed was not only the right decision, but was also the fiscally responsible decision.”

In one instance, Sun Life had to quickly hire 40 people to staff a call center. They met the goal in the desired timeframe, with Indeed providing 17% of the hires for that campaign. “We don’t see Indeed as just a paid service, we see it as a strategic partnership. We rely on our Account Manager to partner with us and provide recommendations to help us achieve our goals. It’s a relationship based on trust.”

Sun Life can now build upon these goals to source candidates for all kinds of roles. “The fact that we were able to hire so many people from Indeed speaks to the quality of the candidates using it,” Ann said. “They are more relevant and engaged, which leads to a better hire rate. The crux of what we’re trying to do is moving towards data-driven results. Now, we have sound decision-making abilities and that pays off for us within the organization.”